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Aqua House

Aqua house
deals with contemporary urban nomadic living conditions and the overwhelming
landscape of Goa. The processes are further influenced by the predominant Portuguese house-form with its intriguing
intricacies of lives beneath a single roof, and the location. The site forms a threshold: between the village and the beach
and between social mooring and vagrancy – Anjuna being the cradle of the Hippy
culture. The key-word here is in-between-ness:
of site – it’s physical and cultural position; of the principle participants –
neither the architect nor the clients being residents but frequent visitors to
Goa, and habitual travellers in their own right; and of the program – a home
away from home, not complete yet adequate. Vacations and pilgrimage attend to the
need for a break from the binding matrix of society. By moving away from
familiarity, or enduring hardships, one exposes the body and mind to all
elements and opens out to receive more. In essence, one seeks a state of trance
to rearrange; and this state is, necessarily, impermanent; so one may not break
away but return replenished – to offer.

The
uncomplicated plan is rationally nestled in the linear site with its short
west-end facing the sea. The breakthrough, however, is in the language. Recessing
the plinth to allow a substantial projection of the masonry surface above
imparted buoyancy to the structure; and this discovery led to a severe
reworking of the scheme, informing the distribution of volumes through the
house and the necessary articulation and configuration of elements for the
purpose. All services – kitchen, bath and toilets, servant’s quarter and store –
are accommodated in the low arms of single
storey masonry massing along the east and north edges of the plot, so as to
buffer the inner living spaces from the traffic outside – a parking lot on the
east and the right of way along the
north edge for the visitors to the beach.

Adding
to the intrigue of this opaque massing is a glazed slit opening, a little below
the slab, running full lengths on both the arms.
The slit climbs down to mark a comma
on the long north face, growing into an enticing louvered window. A tower –
containing the overhead water tank, air conditioning compressors and other
utility – anchors the north-east vertex. An RCC lintel slab with thick inverted
beams runs all along the building’s edge. It floats on RCC columns punctuating
the south side of the living space, affording a large opening to the west. The
fenestration renders further weightlessness to the building by reflecting the
sky and the trees during day and imparting a filtered glow at night. A sweeping
Mangalore-tiled gable roof, with a dramatic structure constructed purely out of
wood, forms one large mass encompassing the inner living spaces; its rafters
are braced with plywood to avoid obtrusive ties that would otherwise run across
the spaces below. The large roof does not sit directly on the mass. Instead, it
forms a sliver through a glazed
wooden girder running all around its perimeter. Thus, in seeking a built form
in trance, the earnest plan became intensely animated – offering varied scales
and textures, light and vistas, and spaces.

The
movement into the house, through a large entry door adjacent to the tower, gradually
spirals through a passage, into a small arrival court, then through a porch,
into a large one-and-half volume living/ dining space, then through one end of
the kitchen bar, into the master bed-room, culminating in to an little
introvert courtyard. At the threshold between the dining and kitchen a flight
of stairs branches up, above the master bedroom, to another sleeping space
overlooking the living/ dining space. The sliver
frames a spectacular panorama of the sea and the horizon from this intimate
space above. The movement branches out of the west end of the living into a
courtyard, and exits the site – at the head of a small infinity pool—from the
north-west corner to meet the path going down to the beach.

This
beach house is made up of myriad fragments and yet does not break away; its
shifting base, torso and head, strive to express a leap of joy, aware of but
unperturbed by gravity.